After recovering from his heart attack, Rick began doing two-mile runs with employees of his high-tech firm before work. He worked his way up to six miles, but then he moved several times and found it difficult to keep running when his established routine was disrupted. He also couldn’t find a convenient place to swim.

WEIGHTY MATTERS

“On Thanksgiving Day one year later, after we had stuffed ourselves with every kind of food imaginable, I realized I had ballooned back up to 245 pounds. I was desperate to do something that would make me trim down. [had already dodged the Grim Reaper once, and I didn’t want him knocking on my door again.”

Armed with a new resolve, rather than a knife and fork, Rick managed to will himself out the door for a couple of runs a week. It wasn’t easy for him at the beginning, though. “It was lonely,” he recalls. “It was just me, myself, and I. [had no idea what I was doing. I was too embarrassed to try to find ‘real’ runners and ask for their advice. I thought they would laugh at me. But I would try to run regularly. I knew, out of desperation, that the only key to getting into shape was to run regularly.

“Without a doubt, the most important body part for a beginning runner resides between the ears. I still remember my fears as if it were yesterday. I didn’t think I looked like a runner. I sure didn’t think guys built like me were runners. It is particularly intimidating in Boulder, where everyone seems to have the body mass of a zipper, and my build was more like a Sherman tank. SoIcouldn’timagine myself as a runner. I spent the first five months of running in quiet and desperate isolation.”

An Internet group Rick stumbled upon called the Clydesdale Virtual Racing Team helped him to break his isolation and give him inspiration. He had considered trying to run in a race but was hesitant. “A slow woman in the Clydesdale Internet group did her first 5K race and wrote about it to everyone. She ran a 40-minute 5K, and she was surprised that she wasn’t dead last. Even more important was her enthusiasm. She was thrilled, and she wanted to do another race as soon as possible.”

Rick’s interest in the Clydesdale group led to his decision to sign up for his first race, the Bolder Boulder 10K. His cardiologist warned him about getting caught up in the excitement and overdoing it, and his girlfriend at that time didn’t like the idea of his running the race. He promised he would make the race a “fun run” and coasted through in 70 minutes. “That was 1995; it was about 55 degrees and raining, so I just kind of dorked around the course in 1:10. It was a blast!”

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Woody Green RUNNING ON THE MOON 89

After that, Rick entered several other local races, each time running faster and finding more enjoyment. In celebration of his achievements, he wrote an essay for the Clydesdale group called “From Drafthorse to Thoroughbred.” Little did he know that this piece of Internet verse would be the key to his meeting his current wife, Karen. “She sent me an ‘Ah shucks’ e-mail, and the rest is history.”

At this point, running and his running friends had become a big part of Rick’s life. Running was more than just a way to stay fit—it was part of his lifestyle. Accordingly, the natural next step for Rick was training for a marathon. He set his sights on the Long Beach Marathon.

DOCTOR KNOWS BEST

“This was when fate took a seemingly cruel turn,” Rick reveals. “I had decided to share my new-found love of running with my cardiologist. I wanted him to give me a medical blessing. So I scheduled an appointment for a full treadmill test. I hammered the treadmill, and the doc asked me a lot of questions about why I wanted to run a marathon. Did I know about hydration and how to avoid overexertion? I thought, ‘This is a slam dunk! I’m a heart rate monitor maven, and I’Il carry my own water.’ But the doc dropped a bomb. Red light and no blessing. He had concerns about the effects of accumulated fatigue. He said, ‘If anything ever happened to you, and another doctor saw your chart, they would have my head!’ The world caved in. I stumbled from his office, as disappointed as I have ever felt. I knew I could run the distance, and here it was being taken from me. My dream was shattered.”

Sometimes a setback can be a great motivator, though, and in this case all it took was finding a loophole in the doctor’s warnings. “Karen took me to watch a 50-kilometer [32-mile] ultrarace, and I discovered that people walk lots during ultras. Hey, guess what? My doctor told me he didn’t want me running continuously for four hours, but if I rested, he didn’t care if Iran eight hours in a day.”

The solution was simple. Rick figured he could do his marathon if he took walk breaks. Following a strangely bent sort of logic, he signed up for a very difficult, hilly trail marathon on Catalina Island. His reasoning? “Of course, I’d walk the uphills. Of course, I’d listen to my heart rate monitor. Heck, I’ll even set it low! See the doctor? Why? I’Il be doing what he told me was okay .. . kind of,” Rick laughs.

The Catalina race started a chain reaction. “That was my first,” he relates. “Once I had that under my belt, I thought I’d try running a road marathon slow. The key to all my long runs is heart rate. If it goes up, I slow the pace down, even if it means walking.”

The Clydesdale Internet group has remained a big motivator for Rick. He estimates he has run with members of that group in 25 different states. Another group that keeps him going is known as the “Satruns”: a group of Boulder runners who get up early every Saturday morning to put in a long run in preparation for their next long run. The camaraderie of this group extends beyond running, and they are a close social group, much like an extended family. A member of the Satruns had been » . experiencing chronic injury prob- | lems, but despite the advice of all in the group, he was not seeking professional help. To help, Rick decided to stage an “intervention”—a term he knew well from the “bad old days.” He set up (and paid for) his friend’s appointments with a physical therapist and massage therapist. Everyone in the group insisted firmly, but lovingly, that their injured mate take advantage of these appointments, and he naturally accepted.

Rick’s association with his running groups has helped him succeed in the marathon beyond his wildest dreams. He has now run in the Chicago, Twin Cities, Big Sur, Boston, New York, Marine Corps, and Boulder Backroads marathons, along with Rick celebrates completing the 2000 Bostwo return trips to Catalina. ton Marathon.

MAKING TIME TO RUN

Rebuilding his business career, Rick is now vice president of a successful computer-related business firm. He has homes in Colorado and California and travels a great deal for his company. His time is precious. When asked how he has time to run, he laughs and says, “I don’t have time to run. I do it anyway!

“T fly between 75,000 and 100,000 miles a year, and the only way to run is to schedule runs into my Daytimer in advance. I have changed many appointments around to accommodate my daily run. I run in all sorts of weather, and when necessary, I run in airports, sometimes in the wee hours of the morning.”

In five years of training, Rick has missed only 7 days of running and once had a streak of 1,178 consecutive days without a miss. The streak came to an end when he and his Boulder running buddies decided to take a short cut on a Sunday run. Everyone was especially tired that day, so they jumped a fence to cut the distance. Rick came down hard on his foot, and the streak and his foot snapped at the same time.

“Running daily is a commitment,” Rick advises, “and it doesn’t happen all by itself. Sometimes, I’ ve started the run only for a streak’s sake, but I’ve rarely been let down by arun. Usually, it turns out to be the best ‘play time’ of the day for me.”

Is Rick’s running really “play,” or is it a new addiction to replace the selfdestructive addictions of his past? When pressed on this question by his running friends, Rick can only laugh about his compulsive personality. “I’ll take this addiction over my old ones any time!”

Right after his first Catalina Marathon, Rick summed up his total change in lifestyle and outlook on life. “Ten years ago, if you asked me if it was more likely that I would run a marathon or walk on the moon, I would have said ’’d walk on the moon.” Remembering those comments, he now adds, “I realized how farfetched it was for me to even consider I’d ever run a marathon. I was a football player, a jock, a moose. Guys like me huffed and puffed our way through our 600-yard time trial at the beginning of each season.”

But a sober, healthy, and fit Rick Schaefer is living proof that dreams as wild as walking on the moon can come true.

“When I started running, I couldn’t control what I was going to do for work,” Rick reflects. “Icouldn’t control the next shot the IRS was going to take. I couldn’t control my girlfriend’s actions. Icouldn’t control lots of things. The one thing I could take total con- Rick with his wife Karen, whom he met through trol of was dragging my fat the Clydesdale group. body out of bed and running over to Waneka Lake. So, if you ask me what running has given me, I would truly have to answer everything!” Bs

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We Frequently Discuss How Well or How Poorly

We Ran One, But We Seldom Ask Ourselves Why We Run Them in the First Place.

BY GARY FRANCHI

F ROM WHAT I’ve seen so far, it’s a pretty strange world. Some people repeatedly drink ’til they puke. A few actually believe what politicians have to say. Hundreds of thousands read the National Enquirer. Then there are those in my state of Colorado who still have Denver Nuggets season tickets— and they aren’t corporate ticket holders, either.

Yes, people can be darn weird. But if you think about it, maybe the strangest people ofall are those of us who run marathons. Are you thinking about it? Well, let me help: First off, we get hornswoggled into running our initial marathon because our training buddy, whom we’ ve always known to be alittle off center, wants to try one and convinces us that all runners should run at least one.

We attempt the first marathon with the hope of “just finishing.” Then we run a second one so we can shoot for a better time. Then we want to take our first trip to Seattle and… well, whatta ya know, they just happen to have a marathon there at a convenient time of the year: Thanksgiving. Then we want to qualify for Boston because it’s “the big one.” So we run Vegas because we’ ve heard it’s a fast course that might help us qualify for that trip to Beantown. Then we start thinking about running a marathon in all 50 states. And so on and so forth. The pain means nothing and is usually quickly forgotten—like as soon as the soreness wears off. Out of pain, out of mind.

WHY DO WE DO IT?

It’s funny—if you’ ve ever fallen into a cactus, you sure are going to be careful not to let that happen again. If you’ ve ever been bitten by a dog, you become wary of petting strange dogs. If you play a sport on skates where you lose teeth

and routinely get hip-checked face first into the boards . . . well, okay, I guess the money’s pretty good, so there are some exceptions to the pain rule.

But unlike having to go to the dentist, we don’t have to keep running marathons. We could easily, and rationally, stick with shorter distances that don’t require such sacrifice, commitment, and, yes, pain. So why do we?

I ask this question because the following conversation really occurred, although I’m not sure if it was in real life. It might have been in a dream. Or maybe I heard it when I was alone typing this. Whatever the case, this was the conversation:

Susie: “Hey, Jim, why do you run marathons, anyway?”

Jim: “I don’t know, Susie. I think because they’ re there.”

Jim: “The roads. If they build them, I will run.”

There’s Reason #1 why we run marathons: Because there are roads. The suckers are everywhere. It follows—logically, I’m sure—that if there are lots of roads and we arerunners, then we have to pack on the miles just to try to cover all the roads in our respective towns. It’s probably a territorial thing. If we live in a big metropolitan area, this can get just a tad difficult and require running tons of miles. And since we’ re running tons of miles anyway, why not just train for and run marathons? Especially if we have a training partner who thinks it would be a good idea.

Reason #2: Our training partners are persuasive. Here’s a typical scenario:

John (during a 10-mile training run with Fred): “What would you think about running St. George? I hear it’s downhill all the way and a PR is virtually guaranteed.”

John: “I think it’s real close to Big Sur, and you know how gorgeous that course looks in the magazine ads.”

Fred: “Cool! Let’s do it.”

Who could resist the chance to run a marathon along the ocean coast in St. George, Utah?

Reason #3: We get to buy new running shoes. It stands to reason that when we’ rerunning tons of miles, we quickly wear out our running shoes. This means we get to experience possibly the greatest, yet little-mentioned, pleasure of being a runner—buying new running shoes. Does anything compare with the pleasure we get from seeing, feeling, and smelling a new pair of running shoes? Okay, so maybe there are one or two things. But a new pair of running shoes has substance. New shoes motivate and inspire us, while evoking a flood of treasured memories from our innocent childhood years. Go ahead and try it— take a big whiff of a brand-new shoe and see what memories come. Why, it’s almost enough to make you run on concrete to wear your shoes out faster.

Gary Franchi WHY DO WE RUN MARATHONS, ANYWAY? B95

Reason #4: You get to see the world. Running marathons all over the country or world can be a real kick. You get to enjoy new experiences and take in a kaleidoscope of visually dynamic sights. Run the prairie, the woods, the beach, the desert—each experience takes you to a place you’ ve never been. And it sure doesn’t hurt that all the travel gets you away from work and helps you forget the chores piling up at home.

Reason #5: You get to wear those cool T-shirts. Yeah, the travel’s great, but what’s coolest is all those marathon T-shirts you stockpile. Not only are these shirts not-so-subtle ads for your achievements, but some of the designs are just plain pretty. Remember Amy Parker’s shirt after she’d run the Grandma’s Marathon? What a conversation piece. Hey, so what if she did wear the shirt for 15 straight days? Is there any such thing as too much cool?

Reason #6: It gives you time alone to think. By nature, we runners are inward-leaning people, often uncomfortable in social situations. Perhaps that’s why we appreciate the solitude of our long training runs. It gives us the opportunity for introspection, to contemplate life and mankind’s evolutionary processes. We burn off our hostilities, escape all the bozos, and get a chance to think clearly in a period of calm without the daily interruptions of the workaday world. For many people, this has got to be the best reason for running.

Reason #7: Completing a marathon gives life new meaning. The achievement is a badge of courage, a seal of accomplishment that draws us out of our shells. Besides making us healthier (we hope), improving our self-esteem, and giving us direction, running a marathon also helps make us more comfortable in social settings. Which brings us to. . .

Reason #8: Marathons give us something to talk about. Alas, most of our socializing continues to be with fellow runners who share our passion—but, then, would we really want it any other way? Our marathon war stories fall pretty flat among a gathering of nonrunners who think Nikes are the only brand of sneakers.

Nonrunner at a party back home: “What do you mean you got bused out 26 miles from the Las Vegas Strip at five in the morning in pitch dark? Are you nuts?”

Runner: “Hey, I ran my marathon PR there.”

Nonrunner: “T didn’t know you were into public relations.”

Runner: “Um, I’ll see ya…”

So, are these eight reasons enough? Do we really need any more motivation to travel the country year after year to run marathons, experience pain, and bring home another cool T-shirt along with those nice finisher medals? Must we have more incentive to carry us through those training periods that include three-hour Sunday-morning jaunts in the middle of summer and mile repeats during the week?